Description and usage
Curtains divided different parts of a large tent.
Translation
The Hebrew word yri‘ah is first used for the cloth strips that covered the Tabernacle (see Linen cloth strips). In most of the passages listed above this word appears in parallelism with a word meaning “tent,” and for that reason it sometimes seems to be a metonym for tent (compare “the ark of God dwells in the yri‘ah ” in 2SA 7:2 with “the ark of the covenant of the LORD is under a yri‘ah ” in 1CH 17:1). In PSA 104:2 the visual imagery “stretched out the heavens like a yri‘ah ” comes from the curtains in the Tabernacle stretched out above the ark.
JDT 14:14 says “Bagoas went in and knocked at the door of the tent” (RSV). This will sound as strange in some languages as it does in English. NAB and NRSV try to solve the problem by changing “door” (aulaia in Greek) to “entry.” GNT goes even farther by rendering “Bagoas went in and clapped his hands in front of the sleeping quarters of the tent.” NJB is closer to the literal meaning of aulaia, saying “Bagoas went inside and struck the curtain dividing the tent.” The point of the story is that Bagoas thought Holofernes was in bed with Judith and made noise so as not to surprise them in an indecent position.